One of the heroes of the Waco fights of the 1990s has passed away. Mike McNulty did more than any other single person to doggedly pursue the truth about Waco. And he produced or co-produced a number of superb films that vividly and compelling explained why the feds were lying about the carnage they unleashed in Texas. And he fed great information to me and other journalists – as well as sometimes impatiently pushing us forward, urging us to turn over more rocks. (I think my sense of humor puzzled or irked him at times during our phone calls, but I came out on the right side of the issue, so he usually tolerated me pretty well.) Mike was never cowed by official bullshit or by the strutting and intimidation attempts by lawmen or political appointee poohbahs. Mike helped Janet Reno get the legacy she deserved.

I quoted Mike at length on an article on the Waco coverup that came out in the Washington Times on the morning of the Oklahoma City bombing, April 19, 1995:

Other investigators are also raising questions about the government’s possible role in killing the Davidians. Michael McNulty, chairman of the Citizens Organization for Public Safety, of Fort Collins, Colo., has conducted an extensive analysis of videotapes on the final assault, as well as interviews with forensic scientists and Davidian survivors.

Mr. McNulty believes FBI snipers shot Davidians on the morning of April 19 as they were running out of the back of the compound to escape the CS gas. (During the FBI-Randy Weaver confrontation a few months before the Waco conflict, one FBI SWAT team member summarized the rules of engagement as “if you see ‘em, shoot ‘em,” according to a confidential Justice Department report). Mr. McNulty argues that infrared videotape indicates that the tanks may have pushed the bodies of the slain Davidians back into the building before the fire began. (Mr. McNulty has portions of the tape, but there are significant gaps that the government has refused to release).

Mr. McNulty also believes the FBI intentionally ignited two fires in the compound the final day with pyrotechnic devices. He says that FBI pyrotechnic devices were fired into areas inundated with CS gas particulates at precisely the same time that fireballs exploded from the back of the gymnasium. According to Army manuals, there is a significant risk of flammability from CS gas particulates. For instance, Army field manual FM-21-27 states on page 21: “Warning: When using the dry agent CS-1, do not discharge indoors. Accumulating dust may explode when exposed to spark or open flame.”

Over at Truth in Media, Ben Swann presents a clear and damning report on how the US actions in Iraq and Syria led to the rise of ISIS. Featuring Antiwar.com’s Angela Keaton. (How did Swann get a one-on-one interview with Barack Obama?!)

A federal lawsuit seeks disclosure of thousands of Central Intelligence Agency files revealing why the CIA is convinced that Israel stole enough U.S. government-owned weapons-grade uranium in the 1960’s to manufacture over a dozen atomic weapons.

The 147-page complaint (PDF) filed in DC’s U.S. District Court contains exhibits about how U.S. weapons-grade uranium was illegally diverted from the now-defunct Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in Apollo, Pennsylvania into the clandestine Israeli nuclear weapons development program. The CIA for decades has blocked researcher Freedom of Information Act access to its core files on the NUMEC diversion.

The lawsuit against CIA comes at the conclusion of IRmep’s courtroom victory this month against the U.S. Department of Defense to release a report (PDF) on the Israeli H-bomb development program, laser enrichment of weapons-grade material and 1987 status of its nuclear weapons production sites.

CIA Tel Aviv Station Chief John Hadden’s analysis that NUMEC “was an Israeli operation from the beginning.”

Former Atomic Energy Commissioner Glenn T. Seaborg’s account of the Energy Department claims that traces of the specialized highly-enriched uranium provided to NUMEC were picked up in Israel.

A GAO report on NUMEC with CIA equity the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel compelled be publicly released in 2014.

Currently, U.S. taxpayers are expected to pay for a nearly half-billion dollar U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cleanup of the environment surrounding the undercapitalized smuggling front’s former plant sites and waste dump.

According to IRmep Director Grant F. Smith, “It is our hope that this lawsuit is a productive step in finally holding those truly responsible for the NUMEC fiasco accountable.”

IRmep is a Washington, DC-based nonprofit researching U.S. Middle East policy formulation. Select CIA and DOD lawsuit filings may be viewed at IRmep’s Center for Policy and Law Enforcement web page at: http://irmep.org/CFL.htm.

In fact, it would be unfair to suggest that he got all his ideas about the world from his brother and father. It would be equally off-base to suggest that he has any of his own. What he, like most of the other Republicans who may run for president, has are muscular-sounding bromides that substitute for understanding.

We no longer scare our enemies? The United States is a superpower that has been at war for 13 years, has brought about regime change in multiple countries, and is currently leading an air campaign against the Islamic State while conducting drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. If those facts give our enemies no anxiety, our enemies are exceedingly dim.

There has been some controversy over whether ISIS, or the Islamic State, is truly a state. Even according to the standard definition of “territorial monopoly of force” (which I think is too restrictive anyway), it would be difficult at this point to justify not calling it a state, if something of a ragtag one.

And its rise as a state in the crucible of war in Iraq and Syria is a fairly typical one. For just as, in the words of Randolph Bourne, “war is the health of the state,” war is also the birth of the state.

This is not only true of states born amid already state-dominated societies, but also of the emergence of primordial states. This was exhaustively detailed by the great sociologist Franz Oppenheimer in his classic work The State (1908). He explained how land states in the Old World virtually always emerged out of war and conquest: specifically the conquest of nomadic herdsmen over settled peasants. The conquerors graduate from shortsighted wanton ravaging to prudentially-curbed extraction. They then evolve from alien tribute demanders to domestic tax collectors, and become progressively entangled with their subjects as a ruling class.

The great classical liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer also pointed to war as the crucible of the primitive state. In his The Man Versus the State (1884), he wrote:

“Be it or be it not true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression and by aggression.”

I hold no brief for State Department spokesperson Marie Harf, who spends most of her time shilling for her bosses’ catastrophic policies in Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and beyond. But it bodes ill for our prospects of peace that the most sensible thing I’ve ever heard her say is the one thing that has put her in possibly career-ending hot water.

MARIE HARF, U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT: I think there are a few stages here, right now we are trying to take their leaders and their fighters off the battlefield in Iraq & Syria, that is where they really flourish.

CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC: Are we killing enough of them?

MARIE HARF: We’re killing a lot of them. And we’re going to keep killing more of them. So are the Egyptians and Jordanians, they’re in this fight with us. We can not win this war by killing them. We can not kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium and longer term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it is lack of opportunity for jobs—

First of all, here is what is problematic about her statement. For one thing, she ignores the deepest of the “root causes,” which is US intervention itself: especially, George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, which fertilized the east of the Fertile Crescent with blood and chaos, yielding a blooming Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) as its harvest.Continue